Hey MLB.com, Fix Your Billing

Here is some information for MLB.tv/premium subscribers. If you have an account with MLB.com like I do (and have had for many years) and had a season pass last year, your plan is likely set up to auto-renew any day now. There are a few catches to this situation to be aware of heading up to that day.

They don’t tell you the exact date it will happen, but they do give an approximation.

It will be drawn from whatever card number they have on file for you set as your primary card on your “Payment Profile.”

If there aren’t sufficient funds available, their page advises you they will try the other cards they have on file, but they don’t tell you in which sequence and give you no control of the sequence.

You can’t delete any of your cards they have on file, online or over the phone.

They tell you that if you don’t like this, hard cheese. You shouldn’t have given it to them in the first place:

If you do not wish for us to use this payment information in this manner, please do not save more than a single primary debit or credit card in your Payment Profile.

If you call them to complain about this, they tell you there isn’t anything that can be done, but someone who presumably also can’t do anything will call you back. And then they don’t, at least not in my case.

There is some good news for this year:

New for 2012: At Bat 12 is now included with purchase of an MLB.TV Premium Subscription – watch LIVE games on your iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch and most Android phones and tablets.

So, if you are like me and set it up last year to come straight out of your checking via debit, be advised that there’s a $120 hit coming RealSoonNow.

Thanks for the warning regarding this: I forgot that this auto-regenerates. I went online and tried to cancel my subscription (temporarily just so I don’t get auto-billed in the next week) and it looks like it’s too late to do that, even though I haven’t even been billed yet. Crap.
Well at least MLB At Bat 12 is free. That was always a gripe of mine, having to pay for both separately.

I’m planning on using the MLB.tv through my XBox this season. I had the extra innings package on cable last year, but none of the games were in HD. Only problem I had was when they first advertised it they didn’t mention you needed an Xbox live gold account. I’m hoping it works out and the streaming is good.

I watched MLB.tv on my Roku and on my Macbook Pro last year. The quality of the streaming is typically very good if your connection can support it, though the “nexgen” player can be kind of flaky on OS X. Under the best circumstances, the picture wasn’t as good as the HD signal I would get back when I subscribed to the package on DirecTV, but it is more flexible. The multiple audio feeds is really nice to have as well. There are still blackouts, which totally sucks. I have an XBOX but have yet to try streaming MLB on it. If it works the same way as the Netflix client, I’ll stick with the Roku.